On Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:25 -0700 (PDT), mike
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I was sorting out what I could drop off at the recyclers, scrapyard
and landfill, when I once again hooked up a Western Digital 40 Gb hard
drive, and once again got a bunch of grief from it, until I put a WD
utilities disk in the floppy drive, just to run the mfg's utilities on
it before tossing it. I selected for the program "install EZbios" -
just because I hadn't done that before, ya know? Next, I told it to
restore track 0 (zero), which it seemed happy enough to do.

You can use MHDD to test each sector:
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

AIUI, MHDD measures the time required to retrieve data from each block
of sectors. Any bad or weak sector will require one or more retries.
Each retry requires an additional revolution. At the end of the test
MHDD reports the number of 5ms, 15ms, 50ms, 150ms, 500ms and 500ms
blocks.

Here is a screenshot:
http://www.techmaniacs.net/files/tank_mhdd/mhdd_3.jpg

MHDD Documentation:
http://www.bandwidthco.com/whitepape...D%20Manual.pdf

EZ-bios is a disk drive overlay (DDO) which loads a small TSR program
into memory to allow a PC to overcome lack of BIOS support for LBA
mode. It was used to overcome BIOS limitations such as 528MB and
28-bit LBA (128GiB / 137GB).

EZ-bios works by overwriting the boot code in sector 0 of your HD with
its own MBR code. The remainder of the TSR code is stored within track
0.